Most pages aren’t reaching a very high percentage of their fans. If you already have a decent fan base, focus on reaching them before you shift your focus to growing your audience.

2. Increase engagement to increase visibility.

Facebook has an algorithm called Edgerank that hides a significant portion of your updates from your fans. In order to increase visibility, you need to increase engagement.

Here are some ways to do that:

Caption Contest

Multiple Choice

Fill-in-the-blank

Inspirational Quotes

Tip: Use photos in status updates. Not only does visual content naturally do well, Edgerank prefers it.

3. Be creative and think outside the box.

One great way to do this is to utilize the fan page cover photo. Ask users to upload their photos in a specific category and have fans vote on their favorite photo. For Jackson Kayak, once we posted the finalists, folks would scramble to rack up “likes” on their image by sharing and tagging their friends and family. We’ve seen this work well with quite a few clients and it’s been a successful growth campaign. On the outset, we planned it as an engagement campaign, but what we didn’t expect was the tagging. Tagging sends a direct notification to people and their curiosity takes them back to our Facebook page. In order to interact with the photo they are tagged in, they have to like the fan page. You get the picture. (pun intended)

4. Lay out your goals.

Before just posting daily or doing a campaign, make sure you know what your end goals are. Website traffic? Sales? New registered users? Engagement on your Facebook page? Fan growth? Each of those have different actions required to meet them.

5. Make sure your fans are consuming your content.

So you know how many fans you have, you know how many you are reaching, you know how many you are engaging. But do you know how many people are consuming your content? Look at consumptions under Facebook Insights and watch your web traffic for CTR’s.

6. Consumptions = success.

If you’re consumption numbers are high, this means your status updates are not only engaging, but people are actually interested in what you are sharing with them. Depending on your call to action in your posts, your web referral traffic from Facebook will be directly impacted by consumptions.

7. When growing your audience, think quality over quantity.

How much does a fan cost? It’s very hard to say, though some have tried to come up with an average. The better question is how much is a fan worth? Only you know that – but once you get your base engaged and consuming, you should have a better idea.

8. Sweepstakes must be relevant to your brand to attract the right audience.

Lots of brands run sweepstakes on Facebook. A major benefit is that they can be cost effective at obtaining new fans. However, those new fans are only if they fit your brand’s target demographic. iPad’s are awesome, but do they gel with your brand?